By Mat Rogers, Director of Agrariana Language and terminology are an integral part of the food movement. Making distinctions between agricultural practices deemed vile and reprehensible, in favor of methods moral and healthful, is a critical organizing tool for activists. Thus the good-food lexicon is...

The first time I heard of Essex Farm, I was working a kitchen/garden internship at the Yestermorrow Design/Build School in Vermont. The school sent me to the Northeast Organic Farming Association’s 2009 conference, where I carefully chose workshops I thought would help me plan and plant a garden that would...

In the chapter on New York in Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood, Taras Grescoe comes down hard on the Big Apple’s elite chefs: Though the chefs I had met were buying from small businessmen who worked sustainably, their menus were still filled with overfished...

By Michael Straus Pictures from opening night at Straus Family Creamery, February 4, 1994. (That’s me with the goatee.) Straus Family Creamery recently turned 17, and I started thinking back to those crazy times. In 1989, my older brother Albert, who’d been managing the farm and doing some pretty...

Elizabeth Andoh is a prominent figure in my cooking consciousness. Her 2005 book, Washoku: Recipes from the Japanese Home Kitchen, opened a new frontier to me: the deceptively simple and elegant world of home-style Japanese cuisine. By following the recipes and techniques in Washoku, the food I cooked was...

In an ideal world, when a restaurant tells you that it serves “sustainable seafood,” you could have some faith that the claim is true, that the chefs and buyers know exactly what they are getting and the issues around how it was caught. The seafood situation in the famously eco-friendly San Francisco Bay...

Mainstream culture and news abound with broad statements about our food system and the choices we make about what we put on the dinner table. Surely you’ve heard that if you want to save the planet, you should eat a vegan diet, since raising livestock contributes significantly to carbon emissions and thus...

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a big fan of pie, supposedly. (Who isn’t?) A few years ago, Austin, Tex. artist Luanne Stovall was baking a buttermilk one in honor of the civil-rights activist and decided to turn sharing it into a vehicle for peace and reconciliation on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Now,...

Critics of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas often say that the acronym ICCAT might better stand for the “International Conspiracy to Catch All Tuna.” At its most recent meeting, ICCAT lived up to that derisive nickname by setting 2011 catch levels for Atlantic bluefin tuna...

The temperatures have plunged below the freezing point, the first major snow of the season has blanketed the ground, and winter is officially here. Baby, it’s cold outside, and there’s not a cute fresh tomato in sight — to which I can only say, thank goodness. After a superabundance of August heat and...

Grist (where I am the food editor) just got a late entry to our Scariest Food of 2010 contest: Gingerbread houses. Not because you can break a tooth on some of these hard-as-drywall sugar shacks, but because if you snacked on one bought at a Whole Foods in 23 states, you might be doubled over right now with...

A few weeks ago, my spare side-by-side fridge/freezer up and died. I was (and remain) pissed about this. It’s a fancy-pants Samsung, about four years old, and the Sears repair guy said the compressor would cost $800 to fix — 75% of what the fridge was new. “Samsung’s great for TVs,...